Sunday, 2 October 2011

Photos at last

This is ancient history for most of you, I have been absent from posting for so long - and if you don't want to see lots of garden photos, log out now!

We started the conference by visiting the City botanic Gardens - hard to believe they were under nearly two metres of water in the floods in January. they look magnificent again now.

This lovely creek is in the children's garden at Mt Cootha Botanic Gardens - established 40 years ago on much higher ground to ensure they could not be flooded like the City BG.

If you click on this photo (and all the others) you will get a better view of these sculptures of the fruit bats (flying foxes) which inhabit the Gardens - and many people's backyards. There was very bright light behind, so they were hard to photograph.

We visited this lovely 7 acre garden at Mt. Tambourine, south of Brisbane. The owners have only been there for 5 1/2 years - it was a steeply sloping area with cattle and horses and a few mature gum trees! They have done nearly all the work themselves - putting in five levels of terraces and planting up all the areas. The area is a volcanic plug so everything grows while you look at it, but we were all still in awe.

This is looking throug the trees in one of the 'rooms' created.

The bluebells are in full flower, the oak avenue in the background is still to get leaves. Until a couple of months ago, there would have been about 500 lavender bushes visible too, but a severe hailstorm smashed the lot - how sad.

Unfortunately they have had a plague of hares so they decided to make a keepsake statue!

These rose terraces are full of Queen Elizabeth roses, still coming into bud.

I loved this waratah, just so sleek and shiny.

They have no reticulated water, so excavated these ponds and installed a pumping system - money appears to be no object, lucky them. They still did most of the work themselves though, and have wonderful vision for what they will create.

A White magnolia.

I love this sleek and shiny telopia (waratah).

Last look before we left.

Perhaps some more photos tomorrow, now I need to keep one step ahead of the painters - never a dull moment in this house. Cheers.

3 comments:

Such a lovely post Robin - you can never have too many pictures of gardens, especially as beautiful as those. Maybe the floods left a legacy of nourishment for the soil - Nature does her best to compensate. The blooms are glorious and even though the real things might be pests, I do like that hare sculpture.

I have to agree to seeing such delightful garden images Robin, thank you so much. Everything looks so beautifully green, and well kept, what a pleasure to look at. It has obviously been a mammoth task for the people with their garden, but as you have said, money doesn't seem to come into the equation. Surprising how things happen when in that situation. I too love the waratah, and the hare sculpture. Lovely to see you managing to grap some time to share your photographs with us. Cheers.